Roddy Doyle tells the story of how, when he was a schoolboy, he and his mates would spend whole afternoons quoting Flann O'Brien back and forth at each other – and no other writer. "All poetry could fuck off," he said. "And everything Irish … But Flann O'Brien wasn't Irish. Flann O'Brien was Dublin."

That's a heartening story about Doyle, and tells us a lot about his writing roots; it also shows an interesting side to O'Brien, and his vexatious relationship to his country. He would often take swipes at the English, but he made sure that the backswing gave the Irish a bit of a clout as well. O'Brien used to get lumped in with Joyce and Beckett, as a sort of unserious alternative, for like them he played games with narrative. But, pace Doyle, he was, in one sense at least, more Irish than either of them, having been fluent in Gaelic before it was popular or profitable to be so (if I may borrow an O'Brienian catchphrase). He had learned, from the cradle, both the Ulster and the more "classical" version, but he took care, even when writing in it, to take the mickey out of government encouragement for the reintroduction of the language. He died distressingly young, at 55, in 1966; it would have been nice to have seen him railing for a few more years.

Throughout his work O'Brien would cast a very dyspeptic eye on what we may call the Irish mythos. That is, the whole rural shtick involving céilidhs, weeping fishermen's widows and shebeens. In "Black Peter", included here, the eponymous hero's first words, on looking at his local landscape – ie a bog – are "God help us, the world is brown," and later on in life, after a breakfast of "stirabout and twelve nettles, lovely nourishing nettles that do be on the bog", he runs to the priest and wakes him to ask: "WHO CREATED ME AND THIS MISERABLE COUNTRY?"

That's quite an early story, written in 1933, under the name Brian O'Nualláin (there are other pseudonyms here, not just the familiar names of Myles na gCopaleen and Brian O'Nolan, but others such as Lir O'Connor – a new one on me). O'Brien, it could be said, was at his best when young; or certainly at his most acerbic. The pieces here date from 1932 to 1966, and include the first seven chapters of his unfinished novel, Slattery's Sago Saga, in which a horribly imperious Scotswoman embarks on a scheme to replace the potato in Ireland with sago. The idea is that with sago being more resistant to blight, future generations will not wish to emigrate to the US and infect it with, among other things, popery. Only O'Brien, you feel, could have got away with the long catalogue of slurs and libels he directs at his own people.

The stories are a mixed bunch, but of interest not only to the O'Brien completist. Some of them are available elsewhere, but often in bowdlerised and debatable editions. (There is also an appendix consisting of the story "Naval Control", which may be by O'Brien. It is hard to keep track of his pseudonyms.) The editors, Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper, and Jack Fennell, the translator from Gaelic, seem to have done a thorough and conscientious job; although they neglect to annotate "Poguemahone Castle" from Slattery's Sago Saga ("póg mo thóin" = "kiss my arse", as doubtless you already knew). But we have metafictional japes, as in "Scenes in a Novel", where the characters rebel against the plots in store for them (the author retaliates by saying "railway accidents are fortunately rare ... but when they happen they are horrible. Think it over"). There is also some of the mock newspaper correspondence with which he made his name, and a couple of pieces, both funny and tragic, that show O'Brien knew what he was talking about when he described the life of an alcoholic.

In short, it's a good showcase – as well as being, as far as I can see, the first book Dalkey Archive has published by the author of The Dalkey Archive. Containing as it does many of its ideas in miniature, it should send you off, or back, to the better-known work.